Here’s a closely guarded secret I never thought I would publish to the world. When I was an 11-year-old boy, every Friday evening, I would furtively disappear from the football ground at the altar boys’ club of our church and ride in a car driven by my late uncle Joe, together with my sister, towards a top-secret location.
I would sink into the seat and disappear, making sure nobody saw me as we drove all the way to Attard and disappear. With time, I perfected my disappearing act to the point of believing I was mastering powers of invisibility.
Because invisibility is what I sought as my good uncle drove us to that weekly destination of hopelessness – Mount Carmel Hospital – to visit my father. In my mind, my number one mission was to make sure that none of my friends knew about this, let alone discussed it, brought it up, or used it to bully me. Boyhood is a jungle.
The gardens were lovely, but that’s where any pretence of mental rehabilitation ends. Long, cold, dreary corridors made me feel even littler. The clink of old keys opening and locking iron doors, the yellowish paint, and the stench of urine, medications and chicken broth – I will never forget those smells.
Toni Busuttil’s brave account of his stay at Mount Carmel didn’t shock me, but it did outrage me that nothing there seems to have changed in 30 years. His descriptions paint very vividly the exact same scenes I witnessed there when I was 11, bringing up old memories. Patients all mixed up in the same wards, sleeping in old hallways and sharing communal showers… the total erosion of dignity… Mr Busuttil’s account is entirely accurate and he needs to be heard. He speaks for many others who are voiceless or afraid of the stigma.
It is a very damning indictment of the institution, but also of our society, that we allow this to happen to our most vulnerable. When I say nothing has changed at Mount Carmel, I say it with full responsibility, because when we’re confronted with the very possible prospect of someone taking their own life, nothing else matters. No amount of administrative or cosmetic changes matter when someone like Mr Busuttil is almost driven to suicide by the very institution meant to help him.
This is by no means a criticism of the staff at Mount Carmel Hospital. Many of those I came across were kind and did all they could. I am told that the chief executive of the hospital for the last two years, Stephanie Xuereb, has been doing a lot with the meagre resources she has to improve conditions – including offering services out of the hospital.
Nothing there [Mount Carmel] seems to have changed in 30 years
Her colleagues describe her as the right person for the job, following a number of incompetent stooges who were appointed before her. But there will always be a number of people who need to be admitted to the hospital who should never face the conditions Mr Busuttil describes. It is up to the health minister to provide all the resources necessary for an overhaul.
Nor do I mean to physically demolish the building, which has its historic value and could be used for millions of other things. Opened in 1861 as a ‘Lunatic Asylum’, also called ‘Asylum for Imbeciles’, the place could be turned into a museum of psychiatry that questions the very practices used there. What I want to see demolished is the institution, because it is outdated and disgraceful. This entire psychiatric institution needs to be bulldozed and rebuilt from scratch.
Even from a selfish point of view, the very fact that we are all, statistically, very possibly going to experience psychological crisis at some stage in our lives, should make us outraged at the prospect of ending up at Mount Carmel Hospital. Just like we are but one petty crime away from ending up in prison and experiencing absolute horrors leading to widespread suicides, we are all even more prone to mental illness ourselves or in our families.
If only for our own selfish sense of self-preservation, we should all be raising our voices against the oppressive, dehumanising environment at our prison and our mental asylum.
I am by no means a mental health expert, but I can recognise dignity when I see it, and it’s not at Mount Carmel. I have no delusions about the need to hospitalise people suffering from the most serious cases of mental illness – we need to give them the care and protection they need, at times even against their own will. A tough pill to swallow, but morally justified. What is totally unjustified is what we end up doing to them – in Mr Busuttil’s case – and countless others – drive them to despair.
I do not expect society to just shed away the stigma it holds towards the mentally ill without serious leadership, but it is damning on our society that we are not demanding change. If in 2022 we still allow the state to repress our fellow citizens in this way, be it under the pretence of mental illness or criminality, then we really do not belong to this century as a European country. We would be as primitive as the institutions repressing us.
Karl Schembri is an aid worker and former journalist.